DAVID YAZBEK

By JESSE GREEN

Published: February 8, 2008

DAVID YAZBEK The demands of musical theater -- beeline storytelling and transparent prosody among them -- usually crush indie-rock songwriters into miserable bits of limp pulp. If David Yazbek has been an exception (his scores for ''The Full Monty'' and ''Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'' are superbly cut gems), that's partly because he sees his Broadway work, including his next project, ''Bruce Lee: Journey to the West,'' as an exacting if lucrative day job. ''When you write for the theater, some of it comes from the gut,'' he said recently, ''but often it's someone else's gut.''

Fans of his Frank Loesser dexterity and Jule Styne savvy will find that Mr. Yazbek's night job has a rather different cast. At his American Songbook concert on Saturday night, he shares the stage not only with the longtime backup band he calls His Warmest Regards but also with special guests who exemplify his range: from the world of opera, the adventurous soprano Lauren Flanigan, and from the world of bizarro, the singer-songwriter Nellie McKay. When it comes to inspiration, Mr. Yazbek, above, half Jewish and half Arab, is something of a pantheist, drawing on sources as diverse as Captain Beefheart, the German group Can, early Godard movies and Tin Pan Alley.

The results can also be heard on his new album, ''Evil Monkey Man,'' which Ghostlight Records will release on Feb. 26. The sulfurous and often despairing mood of its 14 cuts (the first is called ''Terrible Thing'') comes as quite a shock after the general sunniness of his Broadway scores, but the raw materials here are the recent death of his mother and his attempts to understand it. What's no shock is that emotion doesn't capsize his craft. The words may be about the inevitability of decay, but the grooves include mellow bossa novas and uptempo blues. And he still has the wit to rhyme ''soldiers'' with ''Folgers.''